With the arrival of digital cinema, the necessity grows to achieve a high quality imaging system for consumers. The public has become accustomed to the traditional “film look” that they see when going to the movie theater. With digital cinema, digital projectors need to produce an image on the screen that preserves that “film look” since it is a pleasing and widely accepted look. After obtaining a digital image by scanning a motion picture film, the process of transforming the digital data, so that it has the “film-look” when it is projected on a digital projector, is a very tedious, costly and time-consuming process carried out by professionals known as colorists.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,809,164 and 5,239,370 disclose color management systems for emulating the “film-look” by focusing on gamut mapping or compression. Both patents assume that the capturing device has spectral sensitivities that are linear combinations of the CIE 2° Color Matching Functions. U.S. Pat. No. 4,839,721 states that the transformation between the capture medium and the selected color space is performed with a substantially linearized response of the capture medium to the selected color space. It would be an advantage if the spectral sensitivities or response of the capturing device do not need to be a linear combination of the CIE 2° Color Matching Functions or of the selected color space.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,687,011 discloses a system in which a video image and a film image are simultaneously captured, and a computer reassigns color component data based on digital data representative of color component data within the image recorded on film. This is an impractical approach because of the necessity of having to concurrently record a film and a video image. It would be an advantage if there were no need to capture the scene on video to be able to do the transformation of the digital data to match film projection results.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,909,291 discloses a color matching system that initializes a translator by storing profiles of source and destination color devices which include the coordinates in a calibrated color space of the colorants produced in the source and destination devices and a tonal reproduction curve for each device. It would be an advantage if it were not necessary to store any profiles from source or destination devices.
At the present time, professionals known as colorists spend a great amount of time empirically varying the tone scale and color of digitized film images to match, on a digital projector, the look that a film projector would have produced for the same material. A robust, straightforward method is needed that transforms film-originated and scanned digital images for digital projection so that the projected images emulate film projected images while, at the same time, eliminating the need for any manual adjustments to the color and tone scale of digitized images after the originating film has been adjusted for color and tone to create an acceptable release print.